


dead signal

by historymiss



Category: Snowpiercer (2013)
Genre: Gen, Vague Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-15
Updated: 2014-09-15
Packaged: 2018-02-17 12:57:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2310398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/historymiss/pseuds/historymiss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kronol smells like diesel, like the oiled puddles on the metal planks between carriages, like the foul breath of the train. Yona learned to balance the rocks in her fingers when she was thirteen. She has brown dips where they fit, ringed in red where the healthy flesh meets the sick. (sometimes she licks them- they taste delicious, welts burning along her tongue). Mostly, Kronol smells like ghosts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	dead signal

Kronol smells like diesel, like the oiled puddles on the metal planks between carriages, like the foul breath of the train. Yona learned to balance the rocks in her fingers when she was thirteen. She has brown dips where they fit, ringed in red where the healthy flesh meets the sick. (sometimes she licks them- they taste delicious, welts burning along her tongue). Mostly, Kronol smells like ghosts.

Father doesn't understand this. Or maybe he does, but he's got too much to care about. Or maybe it's one of those things you have to be born on the train to understand, like the special way of rolling your gait, the trick of listening to the clatter of the rails, the chattering teeth of the dead.

Father thinks Mother is out there, among the ice and snow. Father doesn't know a goddamned thing. Mother is in here, and her spirit is trapped by the tracks, and when she screams her angry words in Yona's face, her breath smells like disease, like madness, like fuel and faulty wire.

Her breath smells of Kronol. 

\---

Grey didn't lose much when he lost his tongue. The world's too noisy anyway, the thunder of the tracks and the thousand tiny groans and mutterings that make up the soundtrack of life in the Tail. One less voice is probably a blessing. 

Not being able to answer back has never really been a problem. He has the words Gilliam tattooed on his skin in flowing, cursive script, after all. He has his knives, his strength. And answering the ghosts wouldn't make them go away.

They speak in the cluttering clunk of the tracks. the stuttering _shaka-shaka_  that changes as they switch points from America down to Mexico and Brazil and back up again. Whispers from the old world, carried in the iron. Grey listens to them at night, Gilliam's warm breathing against the words on his skin. The content, at least, is familiar, and Grey closes his eyes as shapes rise around them in the dark.

_Surrender. Cold. Run. Die._

\---

For some reason Curtis won't talk about where Edgar came from. Edgar doesn't care. Curtis thinks it's because Edgar doesn't remember. That's true enough, he doesn't remember in any way Curtis would recognise, but he can see her, yes, clear as day, even with both eyes open and the gloom of the Tail piled around them in drifts. Mam's there, her hair curling over her shoulders, her eyes dark and hollow.

She follows Curtis, clinging to him like a shadow.

Edgar's going to ask him what that means, one day. He thinks he knows (she mouths a word, holds out her hands- something about trust, and _safe_ ).

Still.

He'd like to be sure.


End file.
